External GPUs for Macbooks and iMacs?

QuickHitRecord

Has anyone used an Akitio Thunder2 or something similar to run a more powerful GPU on their Mac via Thunderbolt? Like this:

What have been your experiences as they pertain to editing, grading, and graphics work? Is there a way to do this that's less hack-y (i.e. prone to user error)?

There's also a product on the market called the 'BizonBox', but it appears that it may be a case of false advertising.

monowav

For their price you might as well build a hackintosh.

Gamer_s

maybe more attractive alternatives will be developed down the line with usb-c and thunderbolt 3?

alcomposer

Problem is thunderbolt isn't fast enough for gpu. If so would probably be good solution.

CFreak

I was in the same boat 2 ½ years ago until I built my Hackintosh. That really solved the Mac + GPU issue for me. Trying to add a GPU to a mac laptop seems iffy at best. There are 2 builds on this site, the 2nd being an improvement on the 1st and only ca. $100 in parts, but, I think it's a windows +bootcamp solution:

FIRST: http://forum.techinferno.com/implementation-guides-apple/4271-2013-11-macbook-air-gtx570%404gbps-c-tbec2-pe4l-2-1b-win7-%5Bkloper%5D.html

SECOND: http://forum.techinferno.com/implementation-guides-apple/4570-2012-13-macbook-pro-retina-gtx660%4010gbps-tb1-sonnet-ee-se-win7-8-%5Bstrandmatte%5D.html

Personally, I would rather not risk damaging an expansive laptop to get desktop performance.

Psyco

If you get a Mac Pro (no, not that trashcan, I mean one of the old big towers that outperform the trashcan) and you are running OSX 10.8 or higher, you can put ANY PC graphics card into it and it will work without problems.

For the new Nvidia GTX 970 you would need OS 10.9+. You don't get a boot pic, but all the performance - there is no need for any expensive speacial Mac cards any more.

CFreak

+1 what @Psyco said.

QuickHitRecord

Just saw this: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thewolfe/the-wolfe-supercharge-your-laptop

Have they figured out a way around the Thunderbolt speed issue?

eatstoomuchjam

Thunderbolt 2 is 20 gigabits per second. Thunderbolt 3 is 40 gigabits per second. Uncompressed 4K is somewhere around 4 gigabits per second. It seems unlikely that thunderbolt will be the limiting factor for a lot of video editing use cases as long as the filters were written correctly.

QuickHitRecord

@eatstoomuchjam

So this might be a legit solution for editing or grading 4K ProResHQ (with Thunderbolt 2) or 4K ProRes4444 (with Thunderbolt 3) in real time?

eatstoomuchjam

@QuickHitRecord I've never tried an external GPU, but you could seek opinions from owners of existing ones (and apparently avoid Bizon because it's a heavily-marked-up thing that you can just make yourself).

Judging from what I'm finding, you do get benefit from the GPU, but not as much as you see in a local PCIe slot (not surprising, the latency over Thunderbolt is higher). It looks like about 80% of the benefit of putting the card in a local slot. It also looks like it's buggy and a little bit of a pain. :)

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/tips/MBP_ThunderBoltVideoCard.htm

http://udibr.github.io/using-external-gtx-980-with-macbook-pro.html

https://www.techinferno.com/index.php?/forums/topic/6198-2013-13-macbook-pro-gtx97016gbps-tb2-akitio-thunder2-win81osx1010-dschijn/

https://odd-one-out.serek.eu/thunderbolt-2-egpu-setup-using-akitio-thunder2/

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/30nw94/my_weekend_project_a_thunderbolt2_external_gpu/

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/31sa47/has_anyone_used_a_external_gpu_through_thunderbolt/

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